WASHINGTON -- Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative reporter who covered the civil rights movement and the
Watergate scandal for the Los Angeles Times and was the paper's
Washington bureau chief for 20 years, died today. He was 80.

Nelson,
who had pancreatic cancer, died at his home in the Washington suburb of
Bethesda, Md., said Richard Cooper, a family friend and longtime Times
associate.

Nelson, an Alabama native, spent more than 35 years
with the Los Angeles Times, stepping down as its chief Washington
correspondent in 2001. He joined the Times in 1965 and in 1970 began
working in its Washington bureau. He was bureau chief from 1975 to the
end of 1995.

As a reporter with The Atlanta Constitution in 1960,
he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for exposing malpractice
and other problems at the 12,000-patient state mental hospital in
Milledgeville, Ga.

"Jack was a reporter's reporter," said Doyle
McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times. "He maintained
that the main thing people want from newspapers is facts -- facts they
didn't know before, and preferably facts that somebody didn't want them
to know. Jack was tolerant of opinion writers; he respected analysis
writers, and he even admired one or two feature writers. But he
believed the only good reason to be a reporter was to reveal hidden
facts and bring them to light."

Nelson began focusing on civil rights issues when he opened the Los Angeles Times bureau in Atlanta in 1965.

"He
carried his investigative abilities forward and applied them to what
was going on in the South during the civil rights era," said veteran
journalist Gene Roberts, an author of the book "The Race Beat: The
Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation." ''Jack
had what the military calls 'command presence.' He was very
self-confident and his earnestness and authority communicated itself."

Two
of Nelson's five books stemmed from his civil rights reporting: "The
Orangeburg Massacre" (1970), co-authored with Jack Bass, which
chronicled the 1968 incident in which police fired into a crowd of
young protesters at South Carolina State College, killing three, and
"Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews" (1993).

"A
reporter likes to pride himself on being as objective as he can and,
you know, tell them both sides of the story. Well, there's hardly two
sides to a story of a man being denied the basic right to vote," Nelson
said in an interview in 2004. "There's no two sides to a story of a
lynching. A lynching is a lynching."

Nelson covered presidential
administrations from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. During the
Watergate scandal, he scored an exclusive interview with a security
guard for the Nixon re-election campaign who had been involved in the
break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

John
Howard Nelson was born on Oct. 11, 1929, in Talladega, Ala., and
graduated from high school in Biloxi, Miss. He was a reporter for the
Biloxi Daily Herald from 1947 to 1951 before serving a stint in the
U.S. Army. He joined The Atlanta Constitution in 1952.

Survivors
include his wife, journalist Barbara Matusow, and three children,
Karen, John and Steven, from his marriage to Virginia Dickinson.